LFU:online

Institut für Amerikastudien Institut für Amerikastudien

Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Christian Quendler Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Christian Quendler, +43 512 507 4177

610010

Time and Space in Early American Cinema

PS 2

3,5

wöch.

keine Angabe

Englisch

To become familiar with cinematic narrative techniques as well as early American film history, to achieve proficiency in film analysis and to develop interpretative skills

The emergence of cinema coincides with a period of radical changes in the cultural perception of time and space. At the end of the nineteenth century the cinema joined a series of new inventions and improvements in telecommunication (e.g. the telephone and the telegraph), transportation (e.g. the locomotive and the automobile), and recording technologies (e.g. photography and phonography), which broke down conventional boundaries of time and space. Today cinema is often celebrated as the spatio-temporal medium, whose manipulation of time and space remains unparalleled by other arts. Cinema creates new spaces through the montage of disparate places and it explores impossible spaces through special effects and digital tracking shots (a space trip through galaxies becomes a brief visual pleasure). In this proseminar we will turn to the beginnings of film. We will watch short and feature films of pre-classical Hollywood Cinema and investigate how cinematic time and space developed from a theatrical tradition.

Introductory lecture input, oral presentations, film analysis, and discussions

Active participation, oral presentation; analysis of a short film sequence, research paper (10-15 pages)

Charlie Keil, _Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913_. The University of Wisconsin Press: 2001 (Chapter 4).

Students must have passed the "Introduction to American Literature and Culture" to attend this course
Beginn: 11. März 2008